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How must this blank be filled?

Do you want anything else, or ...... go home now?

  1. I can

  2. can I

I thought the answer is the number one, since the real question has been asked at the beginning of the sentence, but someone said that the answer is the second one, why is that so?

I mean the first one "Do you want anything else or I can go home?" makes more sense to me.

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If I offered you two choices for a meal, I would say:

Do you want pizza, or do you want fish?

Grammatically, the sentence contains two separate questions, though semantically the outcome of the two questions is related, Grammatically, there are two questions, so you have to do subject-auxiliary inversion for both questions.

The same applies in your sentence. Semantically, there is a stronger link between the two questions, but grammatically they are still two questions, so you have to do subject-auxiliary inversion for both questions.

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    This is true even if the questions are less related: “Do you want pizza, or are you full?”
    – Andy Bonner
    Commented Oct 30, 2021 at 17:26

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